Characteristics and fate of isolated permafrost patches in coastal Labrador, Canada

Bodies of peatland permafrost were examined at five sites along a 300&thinsp;km transect spanning the isolated patches permafrost zone in the coastal barrens of southeastern Labrador. Mean annual air temperatures ranged from +1&thinsp;°C in the south (latitude 51.4°&thinsp;N) to −1.1&thinsp;°C in the north (53.7°&thinsp;N) while mean ground temperatures at the top of the permafrost varied respectively from −0.7 to −2.3&thinsp;°C with shallow active layers (40–60&thinsp;cm) throughout. Small surface offsets due to wind scouring of snow from the crests of palsas and peat plateaux, and large thermal offsets due to thick peat are critical to permafrost, which is absent in wetland and forested and forest–tundra areas inland, notwithstanding average air temperatures much lower than near the coast. Most permafrost peatland bodies are less than 5&thinsp;m thick, with a maximum of 10&thinsp;m, with steep geothermal gradients. One-dimensional thermal modelling for two sites showed that they are in equilibrium with the current climate, but the permafrost mounds are generally relict and could not form today without the low snow depths that result from a heaved peat surface. Despite the warm permafrost, model predictions using downscaled global warming scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5) indicate that perennially frozen ground will thaw from the base up and may persist at the southern site until the middle of the 21st century. At the northern site, permafrost is more resilient, persisting to the 2060s under RCP8.5, the 2090s under RCP4.5, or beyond the 21st century under RCP2.6. Despite evidence of peatland permafrost degradation in the study region, the local-scale modelling suggests that the southern boundary of permafrost may not move north as quickly as previously hypothesized.</p

CLaSPS: a new methodology for Knowledge extraction from complex astronomical dataset

In this paper we present the Clustering-Labels-Score Patterns Spotter (CLaSPS), a new methodology for the determination of correlations among astronomical observables in complex datasets, based on the application of distinct unsupervised clustering techniques. The novelty in CLaSPS is the criterion used for the selection of the optimal clusterings, based on a quantitative measure of the degree of correlation between the cluster memberships and the distribution of a set of observables, the labels, not employed for the clustering. In this paper we discuss the applications of CLaSPS to two simple astronomical datasets, both composed of extragalactic sources with photometric observations at different wavelengths from large area surveys. The first dataset, CSC+, is composed of optical quasars spectroscopically selected in the SDSS data, observed in the X-rays by Chandra and with multi-wavelength observations in the near-infrared, optical and ultraviolet spectral intervals. One of the results of the application of CLaSPS to the CSC+ is the re-identification of a well-known correlation between the alphaOX parameter and the near ultraviolet color, in a subset of CSC+ sources with relatively small values of the near-ultraviolet colors. The other dataset consists of a sample of blazars for which photometric observations in the optical, mid and near infrared are available, complemented for a subset of the sources, by Fermi gamma-ray data. The main results of the application of CLaSPS to such datasets have been the discovery of a strong correlation between the multi-wavelength color distribution of blazars and their optical spectral classification in BL Lacs and Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars and a peculiar pattern followed by blazars in the WISE mid-infrared colors space. This pattern and its physical interpretation have been discussed in details in other papers by one of the authors.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

The quality effects of agency staffing in residential aged care.

OBJECTIVES: In Australia, temporary agency workers are a relatively small but enduring component of the residential aged care workforce. However, evidence from other countries suggests reliance on agency workers has a detrimental effect on the quality of care (QoC). We examined whether QoC outcomes differ for Australian residential aged care facilities (RACFs) based on their reliance on agency care staff. METHODS: A retrospective observational study was conducted using de-identified datasets obtained under the legal authority of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. Regression analysis was conducted using data comprising 6221 RACF-year observations, across 5 years (2015-2019), from 1709 unique RACFs in Australia. RESULTS: After controlling for other determinants of QoC, RACFs with a greater reliance on agency care staff have poorer QoC outcomes, with significantly higher rates of complaints, missing persons, reportable assaults, hospitalisations, and accreditation flags. CONCLUSIONS: Consistent with international evidence, we found that the QoC of Australian RACFs is sensitive to the reliance on agency staff in delivering direct care to residents. These findings illustrate the importance of workers' employment conditions, alongside other workforce characteristics, in driving the quality of residential aged care

Detection of Koi herpesvirus (KHV) in Cyprinius carpio (Koi) stocks using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)

Koi herpesvirus (KHV), which is also known as Cyprinid herpesvirus 3 (CyHV-3) infection, is an OIE(international des epizootis) listed disease that caused high losses in common and koi carp in Indonesiaand Japan in 2002 and 2003. Since the mid of 2006, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has been usedin Malaysia for surveillance of koi fingerlings to detect virus nucleic acid, but it has been found to produceunreliable results. Following this, an alternative enzyme-link immunosorbent assay (ELISA) technique forthe detection of antibody against KHV was used to find evidence of KHV infection in koi carp stocks on farmsthat had been sampled for the PCR. For this purpose, a total of 245 serum samples from koi carp stocks werecollected and tested for the antibody to KHV by the ELISA at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries andAquaculture Science (CEFAS) laboratory, Weymouth, UK. Two hundred and eight samples were found to benegative but 37 others were either definitely positive or close to borderline positive and all were retested. Thefinal results showed that 222 (90%) samples were confirmed as negative and 19 (8%) others were definitelypositive. Meanwhile, four samples (1.6%) were positive at dilutions of 1:400 or 1:200, but cross reactionswith CyHV-1 (causing herpesviral epidermal hyperplasia) could have occurred at those dilutions. Three of thesamples were the only positive fish at two sites, but the fourth sample came from a site at which there were 4definite positive samples (from 20 fish sampled). Thus this study confirmed that Malaysian koi stocks havepreviously been exposed to KHV. With the lack of bio-security measures and awareness, there was a highprobability that the koi carp had been exposed to KHV, leading to subclinical infections and some fish mightpossibly have become carriers of the virus. Hence, further surveillance needs to be conducted to determinethe true situation of the KHV infection in Malaysia

Differential expression of secreted factors SOSTDC1 and ADAMTS8 cause pro-fibrotic changes in linear morphoea fibroblasts

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Badshah, I. I., et al. "Differential expression of secreted factors SOSTDC1 and ADAMTS8 cause pro-fibrotic changes in linear morphoea fibroblasts." British Journal of Dermatology 0(ja)., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/bjd.17352. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived VersionsFunding: RO, IB and SB are funded by the Great Ormond Street Children's Charity. This research was supported by the NIHR Great Ormond Street Hospital Biomedical Research Centr

Two novel approaches for photometric redshift estimation based on SDSS and 2MASS databases

We investigate two training-set methods: support vector machines (SVMs) and Kernel Regression (KR) for photometric redshift estimation with the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 and Two Micron All Sky Survey databases. We probe the performances of SVMs and KR for different input patterns. Our experiments show that the more parameters considered, the accuracy doesn't always increase, and only when appropriate parameters chosen, the accuracy can improve. Moreover for different approaches, the best input pattern is different. With different parameters as input, the optimal bandwidth is dissimilar for KR. The rms errors of photometric redshifts based on SVM and KR methods are less than 0.03 and 0.02, respectively. Finally the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches are summarized. Compared to other methods of estimating photometric redshifts, they show their superiorities, especially KR, in terms of accuracy.Comment: accepted for publication in ChJA

Evaluating automatic LFG f-structure annotation for the Penn-II treebank

Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG: Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982; Bresnan, 2001; Dalrymple, 2001) f-structures represent abstract syntactic information approximating to basic predicate-argument-modifier (dependency) structure or simple logical form (van Genabith and Crouch, 1996; Cahill et al., 2003a) . A number of methods have been developed (van Genabith et al., 1999a,b, 2001; Frank, 2000; Sadler et al., 2000; Frank et al., 2003) for automatically annotating treebank resources with LFG f-structure information. Until recently, however, most of this work on automatic f-structure annotation has been applied only to limited data sets, so while it may have shown lsquoproof of conceptrsquo, it has not yet demonstrated that the techniques developed scale up to much larger data sets. More recent work (Cahill et al., 2002a,b) has presented efforts in evolving and scaling techniques established in these previous papers to the full Penn-II Treebank (Marcus et al., 1994). In this paper, we present a number of quantitative and qualitative evaluation experiments which provide insights into the effectiveness of the techniques developed to automatically derive a set of f-structures for the more than 1,000,000 words and 49,000 sentences of Penn-II. Currently we obtain 94.85% Precision, 95.4% Recall and 95.09% F-Score for preds-only f-structures against a manually encoded gold standard

Tides on Other Earths: Implications for Exoplanet and Palaeo-Tidal Simulations

A key controller of a planet's rotational evolution, and hence habitability, is tidal dissipation, which on Earth is dominated by the ocean tides. Because exoplanet or deep‐time Earth topographies are unknown, a statistical ensemble is used to constrain possible tidal dissipation rates on an Earth‐like planet. A dedicated tidal model is used together with 120 random continental configurations to simulate Earth's semidiurnal lunar tide. The results show a possible ocean tidal dissipation range spanning 3 orders of magnitude, between 2.3 GWto 1.9 TW (1 TW=1012 W). When model resolution is considered, this compares well with theoretical limits derived for the energetics of Earth's present‐day deep ocean. Consequently, continents exert a fundamental control on tidal dissipation rates and we suggest that plate tectonics on a planet will induce a time‐varying dissipation analogous to Earth's. This will alter rotational periods over millions of years and further complicate the role of tides for planetary evolution. Plain Language Summary The daylength of a planet is key for habitability because it regulates the rate with which solar radiation is received and redistributed at the surface. A main controller of a planet's daylength is the ocean tide, because the dissipation of tidal energy works as a brake on the planet's spin, increasing the daylength. Tides are sensitive to the continental arrangement on a planet, but there are no details of the surface of any exoplanet and only limited information of what Earth looked like in the distant past. The change in Earth's daylength forces the Moon to recede into a higher orbit, but the present‐day recession rate is very high and does not fit our age models of the moon, implying that the tides must have been much weaker in the distant past. Here, we use a series of tidal predictions for random continental configurations of Earth to provide a range of tidal dissipation rates and thus an estimate of how the tides in the deep past may have evolved as Earth's continents grew more and more complex. This research also provides a range of dissipation rates that can be used for simulations of the rotational and orbital evolution of exoplanets

Moisture susceptibility of high and low compaction dry process crumb rubber modified asphalt mixtures

The field performance of dry process crumb rubber-modified (CRM) asphalt mixtures has been reported to be inconsistent with stripping and premature cracking on the surfacing. One of the concerns is that, because achieving field compaction of CRM material is difficult due to the inherent resilient nature of the rubber particle, nonuniform field compaction may lead to a deficient bond between rubber and bitumen. To assess the influence of compaction, a series of CRM and control mixtures was produced and compacted at two levels: 4% (low, optimum laboratory compaction) and 8% (high, field experience) air void content. The long-term durability, in regard to moisture susceptibility of the mixtures, was assessed by conducting repeated moisture conditioning cycles. Mechanical properties (stiffness, fatigue, and resistance to permanent deformation) were determined in the Nottingham Asphalt Tester. Results indicated that compared with conventional mixtures, the CRM mixtures, regardless of compaction effort, are more susceptible to moisture with the degree of susceptibility primarily depending on the amount of rubber in the mixture, rather than the difference in compaction. This behavior is different from that of conventional mixtures in which, as expected, poorly compacted mixtures were found to be more susceptible to moisture than were well-compacted mixtures